I’m a bit put off by the screechy patriotic noises emanating from the aftermath of the Marathon bombing. The local Boston commentators go on about how Boston will take two punches to deliver one, how the firefighters and cops and others ran into the bombed area to help people, as if everyone else in the world would run away and only Bostonians are noble enough to rush to the aid of the injured, and so forth and so on.

The only attempt to connect what happened in Boston to events elsewhere in the world has been to blame Islamic extremism. Not registering on the radar of these preachy screechers is the fact that if the United States had not been such a bad actor in the world this sort of thing wouldn’t have happened here.

We ripped Iraq apart for no reason and now scores of people in Iraq die in terrorist bombings every week. Week after week. That’s on the United States for destroying a stable, if unsavory, government. We have shredded Afghanistan, and continue to kill innocents, women and children, every day, and terrorist bombings there have been picking up the pace of late.

And Syria. Bloody Syria. The ugly regime of Assad has slaughtered untold tens of thousands of its citizens for two years, while the United States twiddled its thumbs. When the U.S. finally decided it might be to its advantage to intervene to stop the slaughter of innocents by the government, it first pleaded, then it made empty threats and set up useless sanctions, and then decided to send aid. Blankets and medicine to fight jets and artillery. But no weapons, none of the arms so desperately needed by the rebellion, by the people doing the fighting and dying, because…wait for it… because later on the weapons might fall into the ‘wrong’ hands. So it’s okay for Assad to engage in the mass slaughter of unarmed civilians, to send jets and helicopters and artillery against women and children in cities, to unleash some of the most vicious militias on the face of the earth against families, but not for the U.S. to provide arms and ammunition to the fighters because of some possible consequence out there in the future. The only thing such a policy accomplishes is to make sure that if the rebellion succeeds the people who fought and bled will remember that the United States sat on its hands and watched thousands die at the hands of a vicious dictator.

And why? Because when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan the United States sent arms to the rebels there and the rebels ultimately turned out to be people the geniuses in the U.S. government couldn’t control or buy off. So now the current geniuses, who probably went to the same school as those other geniuses, have decided to change the policy. In other words, they’re still thinking in terms of the Afghan-Soviet conflict and ignoring the completely different Syrian rebellion that’s happening under their noses.

No one should doubt for a minute that if Assad succeeds in crushing the rebellion the United States will just cozy up to him again. And when it does, the Syrian people will see that and they will remember.

But that’s how the United States does business in the world. Never mind the people. Love the tyrant. Love the money. Screw the peasants. That’s how it does business in the Middle East, in South Asia, in Central America, in South America, in the Far East. We shout ‘Democracy!’ and we shout ‘Liberty!’ and then we send in our corporations to rape the people and to rape the country.

And then when someone steps on our little toe, as at the Boston Marathon, because they see all of this and decide to take a bit of revenge, the United States gets offended and plays the victim of horrible, terrible, evil people. I’m surprised we haven’t bombed Dagestan or Kyrgyzstan, where the Tsarnaev family came from. Or Cambridge, for that matter. After all, that’s where these two killers lived. Must be an evil place.

Yes, the Marathon bombings were tragic. Yes, it’s sad about the deaths and the injuries and the suffering. Yes, the Tsarnaev brothers were bad actors.

But what the people of Boston and the United States refuse to see, refuse to understand, refuse to even consider, is that the act was inevitable, if not in Boston then somewhere in America, that it was a direct result of the actions of the United States in the world. It’s called blowback, and the winds of blowback are getting stronger. They swirl into every corner of the United States and they’ll touch people who do see, who have a stake out there in the world – brothers, sisters, parents, children, cousins, a town, a village, a city – and who recognize the futility of trying to talk sense to a government that puts itself above all others and arrogantly seeks to rule the world, arrogantly ignores international law, arrogantly attacks innocents in pursuit of endless war benefiting only war profiteers and corporations who refuse to pay taxes while profiting from having their talons deep in the bowels of Congress and every Executive Administration of the last several decades.

Cry for the victims of Boston if you will, and you should. But don’t ever forget that the bombs of the Tsarnaev brothers were created in the inner circles of the United States government.

Syria, run by a psychopathic mass murderer and liar operating an army that drags children out into the street and cuts their throats, that drags old men into the street and shoots them in the head, that unleashes furious artillery bombardments on civilians, on Syrians – Syria, a blood-drenched span of territory that exposes the moral failure and cravenness of the Western European countries and the Arab world.

Never mind Russia and China’s objections. They understand Bashar al Assad. He’s doing what they do when they decide it’s necessary. The rule is to kill and keep killing until nobody is left to fight back. By their lights and their morality Assad is a piker, a ten-cent killer.

But the West?

Time and again the West and the Arab nations have taken Assad’s word that he would call off the murder of civilians, and time and again he has lied and continued the slaughter.

And the American State Department? They talk of two things. Graduated sanctions and stability. Nonsense on both counts.

Sanctions haven’t slowed down the killing. And if Assad wins out, crushing the opposition, what then of the precious sanctions? Keep them in place and further crush the Syrian people while Assad eats caviar and orders movies from Amazon? Or remove them and concede victory to a mass murderer?

And then there’s stability. That’s a big word with the State Department. We can’t arm the opposition, say the suits, because that might destabilize the country and the region. Apparently they don’t follow the news or read their own cable traffic.

The region hasn’t been stable since our own psychopathic killer, George W. Bush, illegally invaded Iraq nine years ago. And Syria is not going to be stable until Assad slaughters a few hundred thousand of his fellow Syrians.

State’s other big selling point is ‘We can’t arm the opposition because we don’t know what will come of it.’ Oh, well perhaps they know what will come of the ongoing slaughter? It seems they define certainty as continued slaughter by Assad until he is firmly in charge again.

The Arab world is no better. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the United States has armed to the teeth several Arab countries, and yet those arms sit quietly, unused, while the Arab leadership decries the murderous bloodbath in Syria.

And the United States itself? A complete moral failure compounded with rank hypocrisy. The West took on Libya with little delay, but Syria? Oh, the terrain is difficult there. And the military is kind of tough.

Did you ever notice that the only countries the United States is willing to take on militarily are weak, if not pathetic, militarily. Panama. Grenada. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. The vaunted American military machine has shown that it can be stopped by little brown people armed with AKs and homemade explosives. The Syrian army is a different kettle of fish, isn’t it, Generals?

But this American military machine, backed by a vast and vastly expensive intelligence machine (turned against its own people of late), can’t take its million dollar cruise missiles and put them on Assad’s head and on his family’s heads and on the heads of the generals who murder children in the streets of Homs? That hugely expensive and expansive military machine of the Americans can’t send its billion dollar invisible bombers over Syria and cripple the tank columns of the Syrian army, smash command and control installations, flatten military supply dumps?

Apparently not. That might destabilize the country.

Here in America we make guns freely available to any creep, cretin, or violent moron who wants one. But we can’t provide small arms to people fighting for their lives in Syria? Because we can’t see the future? Because they might decide that the United States is crap and not to be trusted?

With this kind of thinking the Holocaust would have gone on until every Jew in the world was ashes; Rwanda would still be going on… oh, wait, nobody did anything to stop that either – they just ran out of people to hack to death; the Balkans would to this day be bathing in enough blood to satisfy even the depraved Countess Elizabeth Bathory. And on. And on. And on.

‘Never again!’ is a joke. It’s a phrase used by politicians and people everywhere to make themselves feel better when they haven’t the guts or the moral courage to do what’s right. It’s what they say when it’s happening, again, right under their noses. It’s their magic charm to ward off evil while they delicately and mincingly step around the pools of blood.

Syria will bleed and nobody with the power to stop it will lift a finger. And soon enough Bashar al Assad will again hobnob with the heads of state in the West and the Arab world. And no one will hear the blood of children crying out from the sands of Syria.

They probably don’t call themselves that, but they should. A few months ago they were a ragtag amateur collection of angry young men seeking freedom from a forty-year tyranny.

They didn’t have a chance in hell of succeeding but they charged into battle against professional, disciplined forces. And got their collective ass kicked. And refused to quit.

NATO forces saved them, kept them going, helped train them and turn them into a force that could survive and learn. But those guys did it themselves, did the fighting, did the dying. Their blood stains the sand from one end of Libya to the other. And as of this morning they’ve bloodied Tripoli and are on the verge of ending Kadhafy.

I hope they hold it together and develop a rational, egalitarian government with a minimum of bloodshed.

Was the United States right to get involved?

Morally? Yes.

Financially? No.

The United States is failing to care for its own people, to take care of its own governance. Does it have the right to interfere in the governance of other countries?

Does such interference nonetheless make the United States a moral country in such matters?

No.

Syria’s tyrant continues to slaughter the Syrian people and continues to lie to the world about his actions. The United States does virtually nothing, its proclamation of sanctions an empty gesture, unsupported by other major players in the sanctions game. Will the Syrians, if they get rid of al-Assad, look to Libya and ask where was the United States when we fought and died?

And Bahrain, what of Bahrain? The people rose up, were slaughtered, were further victimized by Saudi troops, while the United States looked on, supported the Saudi move, said nothing, did nothing, unwilling to risk losing its military assets in Bahrain. What will the Bahrainis ask when they look to Libya?

Afghanistan? The United States, and its so-called allies, continue to brutalize that country by fighting, on the ground, in a civil and religious war. They have succeeded only in destabilizing the entire region, and continue to honor their own dead by insuring that more Americans and many more Afghanis will die in pursuit of a vague goal that makes no sense on any level, to wit, that no terrorist ever attacks the United States from Afghanistan again, completely ignoring that the attack in question came not from Afghanistan, but from airports and flight training centers in the United States and could just as easily have been organized in Peoria and operated from Dallas. But the killing and the waste goes on under the aegis of bobblehead politicians in Washington and their profiteering corporate masters.

Iraq? What’s to be said of Iraq? Only that George W. Bush and his cohort of amoral greedmeisters should long ago have been arrested and locked up in Guantanamo with the so-called terrorists from overseas. The Bushies would have been the real terrorists in Gitmo cages.

So while the Libyan fighters deserve their victory, the United States, which helped the Lions of Libya defeat their tyrant, once again appears to be the clumsy elephant in the room, the amoral giant which has eyes only for its bright and shiny drug of choice – oil – and cares not a whit who dies as it pursues its addiction, pursues it right to the graveyards of Asia and the Middle East as it makes a graveyard of the world.

From a 2006 essay titled ‘History and National Stupidity’ by Arthur Schlesinger, quoted in Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason:

Sometimes, when I am particularly depressed, I ascribe our behavior to stupidity – the stupidity of our leadership, the stupidity of our culture. Thirty years ago we suffered military defeat – fighting an unwinnable war against a country about which we knew nothing . . . Vietnam was bad enough, but to repeat the same experiment thirty years later in Iraq is a strong argument for a case of national stupidity.

In the meantime, let a thousand historical flowers bloom. History is never a closed book or a final verdict. It is always in the making. Let historians not forsake the quest for knowledge, however tricky and full of problems that quest may be, in the interests of an ideology, a nation, a race, a sex, or a cause. The great strength of the practice of history in a free society is its capacity for self-correction.

Of course, it would help if Americans would actually read history, instead of getting it in predigested chunks in Rambo movies and the History Channel. It would help if Americans actually were taught to think in school instead of just to fill in the multiple-choice answers that pass for educational assessment these days. It would help if the media acted as if they actually had a responsibility to the country, to the citizenry, instead of to shareholders who don’t give a damn about either the media or the country.

But that’s asking too much these days. The Republicans put forth two world-class liars and hypocrites to lead the nation into the future, and they are applauded for the trivia of their lives and minds instead of examined for their substance. We are beyond national stupidity, and are well into delusion and psychosis.

Lisa Wangsness writes in the Globe today about The Mitten’s new TV ad criticizing the Republican Party:

“If we’re going to change Washington, Republicans have to put our own house in order,” Romney says in the ad, speaking directly to the camera, ticking off a list of transgressions. “When Republicans act like Democrats, America loses. It’s time for Republicans to start acting like Republicans. It’s time for a change, and change begins with us.”

Well, Mittsy, the Republicans have been acting like Republicans since 1994. They took out a contract on America, and have been so successful that the country is circling the drain.

[Romney] sticks to topics – fiscal discipline, secure borders, and personal morality – that resonate well with the Republican base, which was demoralized after the party lost the Senate and the House in the 2006 elections.

The Republican base must have been pretty happy with the way things were going if they felt demoralized by the 2006 elections. Which is to say they like seeing the country go down the toilet.

And really, do we want another religious freak, one who tortured his dog, who lives rich and hires illegal immigrants to do his yardwork, who jiggered the truth about his residency to run for governor of Massachusetts, who has shown profound ignorance about the Middle East, to be talking to us about personal morality? Taliban, anyone?

But one can’t help notice that the Mitten doesn’t criticize the Bushbaby, and he doesn’t say anything about Iraq. That should warn anyone with two brain cells to rub together that if we let this Republican clown into the White House, we’re going to have more of the same crap the current psychopathic occupant has dumped on us and the world.

Any more Republicanism in this country and we’re going to have to start shooting them down in the streets to take our country back.